Hi:
I could use some direction as to how to make a object that’s been constrained to another moving object “stick” to the surface of a sphere.
Here’s the context:
I’m helping out with an animation that’s to be projected onto a dome that’s being designed to sync with physical lasers on site. The concept is that as a laser flashes on the dome animation a laser on site lights up at the exact same time, programmed to hit a target that corresponds with the laser in the animation.
We’ve developed a workflow that will crop the animated lasers where they intersect with the dome and a way to create targets for the on site lasers to follow. The animation will be rendered in Octane with its spherical camera.
We realize that even though we can make the on-site lasers “hit” the origin point of the projected lasers, the beams will appear bent depending on where an audience member is sitting. The only way the beams would look to perfectly line up would be from the perspective of an audience member sitting in the exact same spot as our spherical camera (dead center of the dome).
We want to add some visual element (to be determined) where the laser hits the dome to help hide the bend, so I need a way to create postion keyframes from where our 3D beams intersect the dome.
End of context.
I’ve attached a scene file in which I’ve used a PSR constraint to tie a cone to our moving beam. The tip of the cone is even with the dome at the start, but as the beam tilts up and to the right the cone diverges from the sphere. It would probably work to just keyframe the Z-offset in the constraint to keep the tip of the cone near the dome, but it would be great if there’s some combination of constraints that could do this automatically and precisely. I don’t know if you can use a Clamp constraint in conjunction with a PSR restraint to do this. My other thought was to use some sort of dynamic connector, but I need to do some R&D on that.
Thanks.
Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics
